At the foot of a sweeping staircase in a stately Bel Air mansion, Greta Gerwig leaned in to adjust Jordan Peele’s bow tie as a camera shutter snapped. Gerwig’s sparkling gown and Peele’s velvet dinner jacket were both in line with the era of classic cinema the photo shoot was meant to evoke—chalky clapboards and saddle pants and the golden age of film. That she, a 34-year-old actress turned director from Sacramento, and he, a 38-year-old bi-racial actor turned director from the Upper West Side, would have been scarce in that age—as they still are today—wasn’t lost on the pair.

“This is the greatest party we never went to,” said Gerwig between shots.

Photograph by Art Streiber.

In an industry where women directors and directors of color are shockingly rare, Gerwig and Peele have broken through and made two of this year’s best-reviewed films. Neither took the traditional path of film school, yet both were hyper-prepared by early careers as self-starting actors and writers, he an uncanny impressionist on his sketch show, Key & Peele, she an indie-film chameleon in movies such as Frances Ha, Mistress America, and 20th Century Women. Deft improvisers, they were both ready when the moment struck. Now, in 2017, Gerwig and Peele have arrived with their first films as solo directors just when Hollywood and the Academy are taking a hard look at who gets the opportunities to tell his or her stories in this town, and who often gets left out.

“The idea of different voices, fresh voices, under-represented voices for so long was considered bad business in Hollywood,” Peele said during an interview at the office of his company, Monkeypaw Productions, in October. “It seems like the world is getting sick of the last 10 years of film, and they want a new perspective; they want something fresh. It just feels like it could be the beginning of a special time in Hollywood.”

“Being a director does create a certain relentlessness and you don’t
know how to let go,” said Gerwig.

In Get Out, Peele hides uncomfortable truths about race inside the Trojan horse of a crowd-pleasing thriller. A young black photographer played by Daniel Kaluuya visits his girlfriend’s white, liberal, self-consciously woke parents and discovers a conspiracy soaked in the blood of black people. The script was a provocative idea Peele had nurtured for years but never envisioned he could talk someone into financing.

“I thought that the victimization of black people and the villainization of white people done in a fun way would be something that [financiers] couldn’t imagine,” Peele said. “Because I didn’t really have much to point to that had messed around with this tone. There are no [comparisons].”

In Lady Bird, Gerwig tells the coming-of-age story of an awkward, theatrical Sacramento teenage girl played by Saoirse Ronan. In contrast to so many films in the form, it’s a mother’s love, not a boyfriend’s, that supplies Lady Bird’s tension and catharsis. What’s more, the lead character’s loss of virginity is played with empathy and affection for the girl, rather than lust and cheerleading for the guy.

Photograph by Art Streiber.

“In the Virginia Woolf speech she gave that was turned into the book A Room of One’s Own, she says, ‘Men don’t know what women do when they’re not there,’” Gerwig said. “Which is a very simple truth, but it is truth. They don’t know . . . I was in the position of being able to access some truth that you would never be able to have if you were a guy, because you aren’t there when mothers and daughters are fighting alone or when best friends are talking. What is the experience of being the teenage girl while you’re with a guy . . . that emotional experience, as opposed to the romantic-comedy tropes?”

Peele, the son of a white mother and a black father, grew up in Manhattan as a shy fan of monster movies and 80s fantasy epics such as Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story. He attended P.S. 87 and found a creative outlet in the Tada! Youth Theater (“‘Tada’ with an exclamation point,” he notes), the same theater company where Kerry Washington got her start. Peele dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College after two years to perform sketch and improv comedy at Second City and Boom Chicago, before joining the cast of MADtv at the same time as another bi-racial performer, who was as outgoing as Peele was introverted, Keegan-Michael Key.

The two forged a friendship and eventually created the sketch comedy show Key & Peele, which would bring Peele to his widest platform yet and win a Peabody Award and two Emmys for its incisive takes on social issues, particularly race. Peele’s memorable characters included an astonishingly good Barack Obama impression; an entitled, selfie-taking girl named Meegan; and an overweight, science-fiction-loving nerd named Wendell. Writing, producing, and starring in the Comedy Central show’s sketches gave Peele the opportunity to make, essentially, 300 short films over five seasons, and to learn from show director Peter Atencio about pacing, editing, and working with actors. “If you don’t naturally have that gunslinger confidence, which I didn’t have as an artist, I wanted to make sure I had all my things in place,” Peele said. “I respected the art form so much, I didn’t want to mess it up.”

After circling his idea for Get Out for five years, Peele pitched it to producer Sean McKittrick over coffee. Despite Peele’s fears that a movie with few antecedents would scare a financier away, McKittrick was inspired by the freshness of the concept, as was the film’s next producer on board, Jason Blum. “I thought it was a terrific, Hitchcockian thriller,” said Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions had made low-budget horror films such as Paranormal Activity as well as the best-picture-nominated drama Whiplash. “We’re very reluctant to work with first-time directors. But he had produced an enormous amount of television, so calling him a first-time director isn’t fair. He talked with such conviction and clarity about what he wanted to do.”

Peele assembled his cast with an eye toward realism, enlisting Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, and Catherine Keener as the white family of Kaluuya’s character’s nightmares. “I knew I’ve got this movie that has, you know, white people doing brain surgery on black people, and it’s a pulpy concept,” Peele said. “The only way this movie works is if, no matter how over-the-top it is, everything feels as real as possible. So with any performance and any detail that doesn’t feel like it could, or would, really happen . . . you have to adjust.” Peele held to his vision. He even persuaded Universal’s marketing department to keep a key reveal from the film out of the trailer, an impressive feat for a first-time director working with major-studio marketers.

After a triumphant premiere at Sundance in January, Get Out hit theaters in February and surpassed all expectations, becoming, with a $4.5 million budget and a $253 million box office, the most profitable movie of the year. Peele’s satire of racial violence arrived as real-life hate crimes were on the rise and neo-Nazis were on the march. “I’m quite certain no one but Jordan knew the way the movie would touch a nerve,” Blum said. “It caught me by surprise. He got my brain thinking about the African-American experience in a different way, in a way that felt vital. It made me really, really angry.”

Since Get Out exploded into theaters, Peele and his wife, comedian Chelsea Peretti, have had a son, and the filmmaker has turned his attention toward building his company, Monkeypaw. His producing projects rely primarily on black talent using genre forms to dig into America’s racist past and present. He’s producing the Spike Lee thriller Black Klansman; a TV drama about Nazi-hunters in America in the 1970s called The Hunt; an adaptation of a novel for HBO that interweaves the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft with racism in the U.S. during the era of Jim Crow called Lovecraft Country; and a Tracy Morgan comedy show for TBS called The Last O.G., about an ex-con who returns to a now gentrified Brooklyn. He’s also at work on his follow-up to Get Out, which Universal has set for 2019, another film that Peele said will use genre as a technique to raise provocative ideas. “Genre to me is about fun; it’s about entertainment,” he said. “Starting in comedy, I’m just linked to the audience and wanting the audience to react audibly. Genre disarms an audience. They kind of surrender and you can get at deeper points.”

DIRECT APPROACH
Gerwig doesn’t totally identify with her protagonist. “I was much more of a rule follower,” she says.

Photograph by Art Streiber.

Photograph by Art Streiber.

Gerwig grew up in Sacramento, California, an intense and artistic kid attending an all-girls Catholic high school and dreaming of a more cosmopolitan life in New York. There are obvious biographical parallels between Gerwig and the title character in Lady Bird. Like Gerwig, Lady Bird lives in Sacramento, attends Catholic school, and is the daughter of a nurse and a computer programmer, played in the film by Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts. But it’s where Lady Bird and Gerwig diverge that interests her. While Lady Bird rebels, at one point dramatically flinging herself out of a moving car, “I was much more of a rule follower and a people pleaser,” Gerwig said. “I was very intent on getting the gold star and keeping straight lines. I think, in a way, writing this character was an exploration of what I wasn’t able to do.” After seeing the film, Gerwig’s mother noticed another key difference, between herself and Metcalf’s character, who responds to her daughter’s boldest act of rebellion by cutting her off. “Oh, Greta, you wish I’d give you the silent treatment,” Gerwig’s mom told her after seeing the film.

“I respected the art form so much, I
didn’t want to mess it up,” Peele said.

Gerwig eventually made it to New York, by way of Barnard College, where she studied English and philosophy, and was cast in a small role in Joe Swanberg’s 2006 film LOL, an early entry in the low-budget, naturalistic style of filmmaking known as mumblecore. Gerwig would soon become the movement’s leading lady, working on more films with Swanberg, including 2008’s Nights and Weekends, which she co-directed, as well as movies by the Duplass brothers and Ti West.

Like Peele—and unlike many cocky young filmmakers—Gerwig found inventive ways to put in her proverbial 10,000 hours before actually calling “Action!” She reached a wider audience after she starred in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, in 2010, and the two began dating and collaborating, co-writing the films Frances Ha and Mistress America for her to star in. “I had always wanted to direct, but because I didn’t go to film school I had a belief that I needed to get some kind of training,” Gerwig said. “I needed to learn my craft. I was lucky because the first films I made were so small and so D.I.Y. that everyone did everything, so if I wasn’t acting in a scene, or writing the next scene we were shooting, I was holding a boom or a camera, and sitting and working on the editing at night. I realized when I was in production for [Lady Bird] that I had been working in films for 10 years.”

Photograph by Art Streiber.

In January of 2015, after writing her Lady Bird script, which at one point ballooned to 350 pages, Gerwig checked herself into a bed-and-breakfast in Cold Spring, New York, to finish it. Not long after, Scott Rudin, who had produced Frances Ha, heard that Gerwig had a script and asked to read it. Rudin’s call came at 11 A.M., and by 4 P.M. he had e-mailed asking to meet. By seven P.M., he had decided to make it, in conjunction with Barry Diller’s IAC Films. Gerwig cast Ronan after the two shared a giddy read-through in a hotel room during the 2015 Toronto Film Festival. Ronan, a fan of Gerwig’s acting, was immediately drawn to a script about a teenage girl that felt funny and real. “Greta’s acting, it’s incredibly honest and witty even when it’s sad,” Ronan said. “She’s totally in her body when she works and performs. Because she’s been an actor, she’s been in our shoes and knows how vulnerable and insecure you can feel.”

On the set, Gerwig borrowed methods she’d picked up from other directors, such as meticulously planning shot lists, holding rehearsals, banning cell phones, and providing name tags for cast and crew in a bid to keep the environment companionable. The intense preparation was smart, but it also came from an extra sense of responsibility she felt as a woman director. “You do think, ‘If they have a bad experience with me, if I don’t know what I’m doing, if I’m unprepared, or if I don’t show up for this with everything I’ve got, it’s going to make it that much harder for the next woman,’” Gerwig said. While she was in postproduction in the spring, A24, the upstart distributor that had just released Barry Jenkins’s 2016 best-picture Oscar winner, Moonlight, came on board to handle the release of the film.

The fall has been a blur of film festivals, starting with Telluride, where critics praised Gerwig’s sharp-witted script and assured directing, and audiences saw something of their own experiences in Ronan’s youthful yearning and Metcalf’s fierce mothering. As she traveled the festival circuit, Gerwig kept taking notes at each screening, in a bid to tweak the sound mix ahead of its planned November release. “I don’t think it ever stops,” Gerwig said. “At some point, someone says, ‘It’s over. The movie’s coming out.’ But being a director does create a certain relentlessness and you don’t know how to let go.”

Gerwig said she plans to return to directing after Lady Bird’s theatrical release is complete, and she has been working on a script. She has thoughts of starting a production company and looks to models like American Zoetrope, the San Francisco studio Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas founded in 1969, with a particular bent toward women directors. “It’s something I would actually like to figure out how to do, and also produce young female filmmakers and give them support and guidance and find their voices and be able to get them on their way.”

Photograph by Art Streiber.

In the last two years, both Gerwig and Peele were invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Despite its recent concerted and controversial diversity push, the group is still 72 percent male and 87 percent white. For both directors, the invitation represented the fulfillment of a childhood dream. At age 12, Peele was watching the Oscars on his sofa at home on the Upper West Side when Whoopi Goldberg won best supporting actress for her performance in Ghost. “It was the representation of seeing a black woman succeed in that role, but also the representation of comedy,” Peele said. “I remember in her speech she said something very encouraging: ‘Look, you can do what you set your mind to.’”

Gerwig began throwing Oscar parties as a teen, buying floor-length gowns from thrift stores and costume jewelry for the occasion, and toasting the winners over glasses of Martinelli’s cider with her theater friends. It’s a tradition she has maintained as an adult living in New York, cider included. “So to be an Academy member was mind-blowing,” Gerwig said. “When someone says, ‘I’d like to thank the Academy,’ inherently I am included in that group. It’s a sense of belonging.”

Photograph by Art Streiber.

When you are finally invited to join a club, it’s fun to toy around with its image. Back at the photo shoot, Gerwig and Peele assumed another pose, mock-arguing behind a desk like a couple in a screwball comedy. She tapped at a typewriter and yelled, “Bill, stop it!” He gesticulated with script pages in his hand. Someone slid a decanter of brown liquor into view. In the classic Hollywood version of this scene, Gerwig would be played by Katharine Hepburn and Peele by Cary Grant. In the 2017 version, they are wholly themselves. “This is how our lives are,” Gerwig said. “This is what we do,” Peele added.